SmugMug pledge against copyright loss

“Here is and example of just one of the many reasons we use SmugMug PRO to help our business and our clients. On the Ball, working for us and ahead of the game is where we need our photographic partners to be.”

Professional Photographer recently published this on their website about SmugMug, (the providers of the Allinson’s Photography online galleries) protecting the rights of photographers and their clients.

The recent Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has had photographers worried about the safety of their images in terms of copyright and usage. Works found to be orphaned are now allowed to be used without the photographer’s permission, given that the user has made some level of effort to try to find the photographer, but people are worried about metadata being stripped and the image then being transformed into an orphan.

This is something SmugMug pledges will never happen, however. SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said: “We know this is a very important issue for photographers but unlike some sites, SmugMug does not strip key metadata from customers’ images. Assuming a customer uploads their images with the proper metadata, we will always maintain the important fields in their display copies (except thumbnails).”You can read our full coverage on the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act here.